Related papers: Instructing nontraditional physics labs: Toward re…
In real-world applications of education, an effective teacher adaptively chooses the next example to teach based on the learner's current state. However, most existing work in algorithmic machine teaching focuses on the batch setting, where…
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can greatly impact their actual problem solving practices and also influence their motivation to learn and ultimately the development of expertise. We developed and validated…
Despite the large body of research showing that students in STEM classes at all levels learn better via active learning than they do via lecture, post-secondary physics and astronomy (P&A) faculty members continue to primarily use…
Imitation learning for acquiring generalizable policies often requires a large volume of demonstration data, making the process significantly costly. One promising strategy to address this challenge is to leverage the cognitive and…
I describe an activity created to help our students learn how to write a scientific paper by reverse engineering a contrastive set of existing papers. I look at three recent implementations of this activity and use a multiple cognitive…
Our paradigm for the use of artificial agents to teach requires among other things that they persist through time in their interaction with human students, in such a way that they "teleport" or "migrate" from an embodiment at one time t to…
One of the key skills of a researcher is noticing what's going on. Both in the experiment one's performing and in one's data: is there something interesting, reason to doubt one's data or suspect that one's theoretical description is…
Physics, like many scientific disciplines, has long struggled with attracting and retaining a diverse population and fostering inclusivity. While there have been improvements in addressing equity issues within physics, significant…
Measurement uncertainty and experimental error are important concepts taught in undergraduate physics laboratories. Although student ideas about error and uncertainty in introductory classical mechanics lab experiments have been studied…
In an academic landscape where female physicists are still strongly underrepresented, underlying causes like unconscious gender bias deserve specific attention. Members of academia are often not aware of their intrinsic, hence unconscious,…
Understanding reader behaviors such as skimming, deep reading, and scanning is essential for improving educational instruction. While prior eye-tracking studies have trained models to recognize reading behaviors, they often rely on…
Contribution: A flipped classroom approach to teaching empirical software engineering increases student learning by providing more time for active learning in class. Background: There is a need for longitudinal studies of the flipped…
Effective problem-solving in physics extends beyond the mere application of mathematical formulas; it necessitates an understanding of how mathematical concepts connect to and reflect the physical world. A strong epistemological framework…
Introductory physics labs can be designed and studied using the Communities of Practice framework, where a group of members pursues a common set of goals by learning and implementing a set of practices. Studies of student preferences and…
Physics Education Research (PER) applies a scientific approach to the question, "How do our students think about and learn physics?" PER allows us to explore such intellectually engaging questions as, "What does it mean to understand…
Gradient-based meta-learning algorithms have gained popularity for their ability to train models on new tasks using limited data. Empirical observations indicate that such algorithms are able to learn a shared representation across tasks,…
Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…
We use the theories of identity statuses and communities of practice to describe three different case studies of students finding their paths through undergraduate physics and developing a physics subject-specific identity. Each case study…
Prompting is a common approach for leveraging LMs in zero-shot settings. However, the underlying mechanisms that enable LMs to perform diverse tasks without task-specific supervision remain poorly understood. Studying the relationship…
Prediction is arguably one of the most basic functions of an intelligent system. In general, the problem of predicting events in the future or between two waypoints is exceedingly difficult. However, most phenomena naturally pass through…